3 comments:

Just to clarify some nomenclature: In U.S. English, "bike lanes" are on-road bike facilities, usually marked with stripes on the road though occasionally there may be physical barriers. They're anywhere from 1 meter to 4 meters wide depending on what the city and state consider acceptable bike lanes. In the UK these are called cycle lanes.

Bike facilities that are segregated from the road are "bike paths" or just "paths" or sometimes "trails." In the UK, these are called Cycleways.

Paved cycleways / bike paths that are alongside the road but not on the road are called "sidepaths" in the U.S. and "cycle tracks" in the UK. This is basically what a sidewalk (US) or pavement (UK), except cyclists are permitted on it.

THanks, fritz. Very informative. We choose to call them "bike lanes" for clarity. To avoid the multilingual confusion. And we try to avoid "bike paths" because, as you note as well, that gives people images of paths through parks or woods.

Although in Danish the word is "cykelsti" - which is directly translated as "bike path". So basically nothing we've both said makes sense... :-)